Dungeon Striker may be Korea's new answer to Diablo III

We check out Eyedentity's latest action RPG and find the perfect class against the G-Star 2012 gauntlet demo.

If you thought the graphics on Diablo III and Torchlight II weren't colorful enough, developer Eyedentity upped the ante with Dungeon Striker. This action RPG has a lot of googly-eyes and big-heads that may turn off some gamers, but its front masks a chaotic-filled battleground of co-operative levels that can give the aforementioned top action RPGs a run for its money. An ironic statement, given its free-to-play nature.

We took a run on the recent G-Star 2012 demo showcasing eight classes -14 in the upcoming open beta and full version - and in a sense, they're what you expect from a game of this calibre. The warrior and berserker are your standard melee perps; go up close to a horde and swing hard and fast. The former can shield bash enemies so that they get stunned, while the latter can go in a rage state and attack faster than usual while dishing out improved damage. We got more kills during the demo's gauntlet stage (kill as many enemies as possible until time runs out) with a combination of the berserker's rage and his plethora of area-of-effect attacks with pretty low cooldowns.

The cannon blazer and wizard also deserve mention for their varying playstyles. The former is a ranged attacker who can buff himself up for turbo-charged shots, as well as summon turrets for suppressing fire. The latter can summon a sigil onto the ground; whenever she's on it, her spells have additional properties and projectiles, as well as shoot out faster than usual.

The sigil spell has an average cooldown, so it's imperative that you exploit it as much as possible during combat. Preferably, we played defensively by moving out as far away from the horde of enemies as possible, plopped down our sigil, and fired spells that had a higher chance for knockbacks.

Our favorite classes by far are the ranger and the assassin. The ranger can set up bamboo traps and evasive moves that have offensive capabilities. She can burrow underground to one end of an area and then leap out to fire arrows, as well as backdash to fire more arrows. Her spread shot fires at a good crowd-controlling arc while also having near-zero cooldown time.

The assassin can not only inflict poison temporarily, but can also jump away from crowds and do a dash slash and an aerial ground pound that comes out swiftly. His area-of-effect knife throw move has little to no cooldown time, so we made that our priority attack. While fast, we were careful not to make him get pounded on by enemies for too long as he's frail as a kitten.

After much class-experimenting and gauntlet-clearing, were happy with what Eyedentity did with the action RPG formula. The game is definitely not a cakewalk, especially when dealing with larger mobs, thus removing the stigma of it being child's play. You can't fault the controls if you die though; they're responsive, well-mapped, and even have joypad support.

The game will be in open beta in 2013 in Korea. There isn't any news on a Western version of this. However, if the growing fanfare of the company's last game, Dragon Nest, is of any indication, there's still a market for saccharine-riddled fares, particularly if it's as frenetic and arcade action-heavy as this game.

I enjoy Co-Op's that require a large amount of fast teamwork. (Teamwork that needs to happen so fast you dont talk about it, you just hope the other guys know what youre doing and back you up.) This looks like fun for the 4 guys that want to have some brews and enjoy a night of fun.

Looks freakn sick. I'd much rather play this than something like D3 and all the other over-rates titles. Much more customization and diverse equipment you can get in this game. On top of that I love having like a tree of classes to which you can promote to and add your own personallity to instead of being stuck with one class with a character that was designed by someone else. At the moment I only have a Mac but if this gets released to the US then I personally would definitely invest in a pc just so I could play this.

have you noticed the hatred people seem to have for things that cannot be truly hated ? does it not show a skewed view of life?

Kids being murdered in Conn. can be hated. People starving or people dying as they are as you read this from disease war, and murder, that can be hated. This is just a game. some people like cute characters. Ever been to South Korea? They are so cute oriented it is something. That is neither bad nor good. If a person did not like that, the mature view would be, "I do not care for that".

have you seen people go beyond that? reading the post here, surely you have.

If you actually feel you hate anything about gaming. anything at all...then your life might be free of purpose and/or tragedy.With so much tragedy around us, our life being without it shows a chronic social disease.

Volunteer at a hospice, and comfort those that are dying in reality. It will help keep you off of these subjects and help you realize what a gift life is and what a waste hating things in games is.

Understanding how serious life is and how little games should be a part of an adults life is is what maturing is.

I like gaming, I really do, but the comments we are seeing everywhere show far too much of peoples emotions are caught up in games.

When we comment that we hate aspects of games, then how do we feel about things that truly deserve hatred? Does it not seem more and more people are feeling nothing at all about the things they should hate ?

maybe this game will hit US on 2014-15 despite that its a MMO... good to see another ARGP in development but I will stay with Diablo 3 for 500+hs yet... after patch 1.05 the game got improved with monster power and other new features!

path of exile was supposed to be better than d3. torchlight 2 was supposed to be a d3 killer. guild wars 2 was rumored to leave d3 without players. guess what, today d3 is still king and it will be for more time to come. it's not perfect, very frustrating at times but many still loves it.

@bicusdicus All I think when i skim through your comment is, this is a gaming website, about games, if you want to save the world go join the peace corps. Otherwise why not just let people express their opinions on their chosen media however they wish.

@DonGibon I agree with you DonG.... I have played and am at the moment playing all 4 of these games. Out of these 4 D3 gets the most playtime by far still. Yeah it is not a perfect game nor is it anywhere near the quality that was and still is Dialo 2! I do not know what it is....but since 1.05 patch my interest for the game has been renewed once again. It is mindless fun nothing more.....I love it when a legendary or set item drops after all that flat-out killing fun!!!!

@DonGibon d3 is a horrible game, and people who play it are blizzards equivalent of apple fanboys. Its not perfect? The game is horribly shallow, boring, and has technical issues. When compared to d2 it is a shell of a game. Path of exile had no advertising, from a new company, and d3 was released around the same time. Besides everyone should know by now that blizzard has so many fanboys with hard ons for all their products regardless of actual quality that you cant kill a blizzard game.

@edinsftw@DonGibon Diablo 3 is truly one of the most addictive games I have ever played. My wife loves the game and she has played about, well zero games. I am an avid gamer and have played thousands of games. That is pretty impressive to bring us together.. I actually despise blizzard after the buyout because of their ripping people off. what technical issues hurt the fun? None for us, none at all, zero matey. All these points point out how wrong you are here. Why even comment on a game you do not like in a article that is not even about D3? you okay?

Your hate toward D3 isn't an absolute fact, it's an opinion. The fact that you think it's boring is also ONLY an opinion, which is very far from absolute universal truth. What's funny about haters like you is that you complain about flaws in D3, which were the EXACT same flaws in D2. Also, the fact that you want what you call "blizz fanboys" to be like "apple fanboys" is also your opinion, and not an absolute truth. You can go as hard as you want on the game's flaw, or what you hate about it, it doesn't change the fact (and that one IS an absolute truth) that it sold 10 M copies, which is an incredible achievement for a game sold ONLY on PC. Also, tell me of one single game in which you saw as much improvement with the patches as D3 did since it's release. I see you coming, you're going to say that they totally HAD to fix to make the game barely playable, but think about it. There are MANY games out there that are still TOTALLY broken, even years after their release. So, Blizz wasn't forced to fix all that. They could have just moved away from Diablo to another of their game, but they didn't. You're that kind of gamer who think that games are forced to go toward your own idea of "the best game" and this is why you're going to complain a LOT more in the future about all of your favorite franchises : developpers doesn't care a single second about haters that bring nothing more than this kind of comments.

@edinsftw@Hekteur Skill trees are good but a dated system and when you have the option to change everything on the fly D3 runes are realy the best ARPG system to date... folowed by Titans Quest witch was one of the best in the past when you were able to mix classes on Skill trees... The only lesser flaw with D3 was... They killed Kain!!! lol... I played lots of ARPG since DIablo1 and and I love the story... sometimes I felt like you but at the end D3 is fast paced and I like it more than other skill tree based RPGs like TL2 that I played for 100hs+ Elite with all classes that dont have any story element to hook you up and you cant respec without lots of cheats("MODS") I'm playing Path of Exile and its great but the art is not quite good to please my eyes but the system is going good and theres some "dark souls feel on its storyline"... there still more to come for sure and I wish all ARPG to be good... Hekteur wrote all those ppl have to think about their games when developers goes on a different aprouch on their franchises Blizzard support is the best! new content for free updates and more... You paid fair $60 for a game that you can play 200hs+... so enjoy it, ;)

@Hekteur I really dont hate the game its just not that good. Every character is the same it just depends on what active skills you have, with no skill tree there is hardly any variation in gameplay. What made d2 so awesome was its replayability and that no character was the exact same within the same class. It has the complexity of an iphone game which is great for anyone who hasn't been playing video games. Lets be honest how much do you think that game would have actually sold without blizzards name, diablos name, and their advertising going towards it?